Hi guys

I just had a bad experience today when trying to convert my switchless AFF8080 to a switched cluster using a pair of CN1610 switches.

The two switches are about 100M from the AFF8080 so the round trip is of cause increased from 0,5M to 200M.

But I do not think this is the problem here?   We of cause use MultiMode fibers between the two DCs, and the fibers checks out and didn’t seem to have any errors.

I followed this guide to convert two ports at a time:

https://library.netapp.com/ecm/ecm_download_file/ECMP1140535

And it seemed to work just great on the console 😉

I must admit that I didn’t down the CN1610 ports as described because you also down the ports on the NetApp side, so it seems pointless to do it on both sides…

Other than that I followed the guide.

As soon as I completed the migration, the users started to complain about very slow access on both CIFS, NFS and iSCSI.

We looked at the port stats of the link but there were no errors… and the system seemed to serve data, just very much slower the normal…  so we had to bite the bullet and switch back again, and as soon as we were back to the normal back2back cables, the system was normal again…

Going through the logs I found this error on one of the four links…

11/9/2020 13:40:34  STOR01-01 ERROR         netif.sfpNotSupported: The SFP+ or QSFP+ module (FINISAR CORP.    FTLF8528P3BCV-QL) installed in e0a is not supported with this network interface.

And I must admit that a non-netapp SFP+ module had found its way to my stash 😉.  The other SFP+ modules were the same PN but just with a “NA1” at the end…. I’m not sure if this could cause this issue?

I have seen poor performance when using a non-supported NIC in a NetApp, but non-supported SFP+ module?

Has anyone had issues like this?

We are on ONTAP 9.7P7 and the CN1610 are running a quote old FW, but I have used them for other projects with no issues (i.e. multi node NetApp clusters)…

/Heino